unthinkable

The University of Waterloo unveiled a new logo today, with what might seem like surprisingly little fanfare. The unveiling consisted of a mention in the Daily Bulletin and a front-page article in Imprint, the student newspaper. There was no press release, although the Daily Bulletin is linked off the front page of the university. I do not remember if I ever had faith in the university telling the whole story themselves, but these days I no longer do, so I thought some back story on the issue might come in handy.

A small trip into the past: last year, on February 14, 2008, a logo which (from my knowledge) was used since at least 2004 was replaced with a slightly modified version, which, among other changes, washed out the colours and changed the fonts used. Although we didn’t know what was to come, the change was stated to be an early piece of an ‘identity review project’ [...] that will take a look at all aspects of how UW presents and explains itself to the outside world.

A disclaimer right off the start: personally, I liked the pre-2008 version the most of any past and present University of Waterloo logos I saw.

At some point during this term, I heard from a friend working at the university that a new logo was under development. On July 14th, in comments under a post about rebranding of Write Stuff, a stationery store on campus, a user posted a image of the logo, as far as I am aware, publicly for the first time. The logo would prove to be identical to the version officially announced today.

The reaction on Livejournal among those who commented consisted of disapproving and sarcastic voices, with not a single voice of support. (The now-deleted comment likened the logo and the university to York University.) But this was Livejournal, that was to be expected, that’s what Livejournallers do. The logo was confirmed by the friend as one roughly similar to what the university had been working on.

The logo was then reposted by (brace for it) Twitter users. Reaction there wasn’t quite overwhelmingly positive either. There were a couple of Facebook “posted items” mentions (one by yours truly), but it didn’t go large.

The next day, July 15th, links to pictures were deleted from Livejournal (the pictures themselves, uploaded with semi-random names to sites like imgur and tinypic, remained), and the reposted pictures were deleted from Twitpic, the de facto standard site for posting pictures to Twitter. Comments posted mentioned that the users were asked to delete them, one referring (possibly hyperbolically) to a “cease and desist”, and another named UW Graphics as party responsible. Feathers were ruffled, but this was still not a major blow-up.

Fast forward to the evening of July 19th, when a (brace for it, again) Facebook group was created to protest the new logo. As Facebook groups tend to, it grew rather quickly. (I hate using Facebook group size as a metric of anything as much if not more as the new person; I will try to use it only as a benchmark or when mentioned by others.) The reaction, while not uniform, was largely negative, with a group supporting it. (At time of writing, the largest Facebook group supporting the new logo that I know of is 87 people. There are probably many more people who support or don’t mind the logo.) Perhaps one of the greatest contributions is an impressive array of amazing (-ly hilarious) Photoshops and mock logos in response to the leaked logo. Over 150 of them were made by over 50 contributors.

On July 22nd, as the Facebook group was pushing 2000 members, a Daily Bulletin issue announced the university’s bold new look. No reference to the leaked logo was made, although the new logo was mentioned. New campus banners were presented, and their description included gems such as dramatic black and bold colours and intensely coloured lines curving dynamically along the length of the banner.

Things went downhill from there. Before any official response regarding the logo from the university, an article by staff member Jesse Rodgers weighed in on the issue of how digital world can mess with branding efforts. This was followed by a number of other blog entries by individuals associated with the university (audrawilliams, Renjie Butalid, joelblog, Eric Logan, likely more). The story was also picked up by the Financial Post Executive Blog, which used it as an example of why rebranding isn’t as easy as saying “let’s rebrand”:

Rebranding an organization is not simply a marketing initiative. It’s a holistic process that must consider and represent every aspect of an organization. Branding is not just about how you want to be seen. It’s about showing the world what you are and what you believe in. Every stakeholder needs a voice and every voice must be represented. Your brand must capture your vision, mission and values, not just a subset.

Today, an issue of Imprint, the student newspaper at UW, and a Daily Bulletin issue was published officially unveiling the logo. The Bulletin quotes Meg Beckel, the university’s vice president of external affairs, as stating the response from key audiences to new logo was overwhelmingly [...] positive, although there were a few dissenting voices. The Bulletin went on to say that [t]here will be an official Facebook site for the new logo, starting this fall, where people can ask questions and make comments.

The Imprint article names eight defining attributes that define UW’s distinctiveness as identified by the Identity Task Force and Marketing Communications Task Force:

innovative, collaborative, connected, creative, risk-taking, courageous, critical-thinking, and unconventional.

It reiterates the claim made in the Bulletin, that current UW students involved in testing the new logo have responded positively. It attempts to address the financial angle, but remains very unclear: while stating that members of university’s task forces were volunteers, it mentions that an outside consultant from Ove Design & Communications joined the team, without naming his salary. It reveals UW Graphics were involved, but doesn’t state what exactly was their job or what they could have been doing otherwise. Finally, it paraphrases Beckel as stating the entire initiative cost approximately half of what she would expect a director to be paid, and names the range for the director’s salary as $85 000 to $120 000 per year. Naming the project as approximately 18 months long, it does not clarify is the entire cost is for a year’s or 18 month’s salary. Neither does it state whether those costs are external (consulting fees) or include salaries of staff working on the project as part of job duties at UW.

In a separate opinion piece, the editor, Michael L. Davenport, gave his take on the issue: instead of trying to brand itself as awesome, geeky, nerdy, and therefore desirable, the university should focus on being awesome, geeky, and nerdy, and then perhaps publicize that.

Creators of the Facebook group posted a statement in response to the Imprint and Daily Bulletin articles. They stated that the university’s open involvement of students came too late in the 18 month long process and are very skeptical of any claims on behalf of university that student input is or will be considered. They go on to say:

The impression received from the meeting was that the logo would more than likely remain unchanged even with open discussion, and we feel this position is very patronizing to students.

As points of interest, early morning on July 24th saw The Register publish an article regarding the issue, weighing in with its usual friendly and sympathethic tone. The commenters seem largely unimpressed with the new logo.

The same day, Brand New weighed in on the logo, and while they didn’t have many pleasant words for the logo itself (It’s not a comfortable logo to look at and it’s unclear what all those lines mean or are meant to do. Unfortunately, they don’t do much other than distract.), the protests were not well received either (whining Facebookers, the propensity of students and faculty to cry foul with any change).

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With that summary in mind, a personal opinion or two.

I agree with a lot of what Davenport wrote in his opinion piece; instead of marketing ourselves as being awesome, we should be awesome. When I was applying to universities in 2004, I can safely say I’ve never seen an ad or promotional material for MIT, but I knew it was a damn good school. Why? Because it was a damn good school, and this kind of stuff just shows. You cannot buy the sort of reputation MIT has. It has to be built, it has to actually be there. People will just talk about it. MIT does cool, geeky, nerdy stuff – I’m sure the billions in endowment don’t hurt, but they don’t publicize stuff like PDEng as innovations. They have cooler stuff, and Slashdot and Engadget do the publicization for them.

I’d love to be proved wrong. I’d love to see the university follow up on the buzzwords, and when marketing itself as innovative, show Geoff Milburn’s hobo air conditioner; when marketing itself as connected, show the power of internet in bringing students together to ask for a logo that doesn’t look like it was made in ten minutes; when marketing itself as courageous, scrap or rebuild from scratch a program or two that have been nothing but an intense failure; when marketing itself as unconventional, don’t spout nothing but the marketing-MBA-suit buzzwords. And when marketing itself as risk-taking, take the risk of rejection and show your prototype logos to 20 000 students who this logo represents.

There are many voices in the Facebook group that say they don’t mind the rebranding itself, they just think the logo is ugly or inappropriate. It’s fine to have that opinion, but I disagree. I don’t see the university doing badly in terms of external image and reputation. In fact, perhaps it’s just the student’s cynicism, but the image of UW outside the university is much better than inside. Marketing campaigns without improvements to the university will only make us more cynical.

I wonder how many classes with less than 10 students enrolled could have been offered for the price of the new logo. I wonder if the university could have afforded to help class and tutorial sizes and not have to freeze hiring as deeply. Perhaps not; the administration hasn’t been forthcoming and clear about the costs. How many language learning labs could have been created? Studies funied? Equipment bought? Education improved?

Finally, the openness: if it wasn’t for the leak, the university as a whole and vast majority of students in particular would have found out about the new logo sometime in October. This bothers me. We’re a university, not a corporation; while we do need revenue, we’re not in a share-price-is-everything stock market rat race. I really don’t like the image of this rebranding being run like a marketing campaign for a soft drink. There is no competitor waiting to scoop us around the corner. No one is going to be surprised if Waterloo said they’re going to market themselves as “innovative” or if we consider “W” as a symbol and lasers as cool.

Also, the logo is ugly.

In my personal opinion.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 13:30:39 and is filed under University of Waterloo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.